What they did not want you to ever find out is that your generation, the generation born between 1980-1995, actually outnumbers the Baby Boomers. They knew that if you ever turned your eye towards political reform, you could change the world. They tried to keep you sated on vapid television shows and vapid music. They cut off your education and fed you brain candy. They took away your music and gave you Top Ten pop stations. They cut off your art and replaced it with endless reality shows for you to plug into, hoping you would sit quietly by as they ran the world. We as a society are only as strong as our weakest link. Give ‘em hell, kids.
ahahahaha wow
I’ve been awake for an hour and it’s already another episode of Megan Is Irritated By Everything, because good Lord is this some naive We Will Rock You bullshit right here, this idea that anybody who enjoys mainstream entertainment is a brainwashed zombie and only the Cool Kids posturing to be different just for the sake of posturing “really” get it.
Do you think that when the Baby Boomers themselves were our age, they weren’t presented with exactly the same kinds of things? (Okay, maybe not reality shows, but “wholesome” teen movies, sure- and on top of that, we have more high-profile scripted dramas on TV in the US now than we have in a while.) Do you think any generation’s ever had it differently? Ever heard the phrase “bread and circuses”, OP? That concept comes from ancient goddamn Rome. And furthermore, to use myself as an example- I probably watch maybe 45 minutes of TV a week and barely listen to any music that’d be considered Top 40 friendly, and I still was in a pretty politics-free bubble until last year. You are not a bold arbiter of truth just because you don’t watch anything with Kardashians in it.
In thirty years, “Call Me Maybe” is going to be oldies radio and people will lament the passing of music like that regardless of what anything they’re playing then sounds like, just like people now automatically assume stuff from the 70s and 80s was “real” music, even if you turn on a station that plays stuff from that era and you find yourself listening to “Fly Robin Fly” or something. Every generation thinks it’s a pack of rebels who’re going to tear down the system away from the stuffy older people who just don’t understand how cooool they are.
So yeah, we should give the system hell, but not for these reasons. The real reason to give the system hell is because inevitably, we will become the system, so we might as well make sure we can become the good system, one that even if it’s still eventually all old people consists of old people who are more than just rich white straight cis Christian men, old people who got sick of the striations of society and didn’t want their kids and grandkids to put up with the same striations.
